exaggerated by a terrific nightmare. It pretty nearly pulled
all the legs off me, and to this hour I cannot tell you if it is
best to put your foot into a footmark— a young pond, I mean
— about thé size of the bottom of a Madeira work arm-chaii,
or whether you should poise yourself on the rim of the same,
and stride forward to its other bank boldly and hopefully.
The footmarks and the places where the elephants had been
rolling were by now filled with water, and the mud underneath
was in places hard and slippery. In spite of my determination
to preserve an awesome and unmoved calm while among
these dangerous savages, I had to give way and laugh
explosively ; to see the portly, powerful Pagan suddenly
convert himself into a quadruped, while Gray Shirt poised
himself on one heel and waved his other leg in the air to advertise
to the assembled nations that he was about to sit down,
was irresistible. No one made such palaver about taking a
seat as Gray Shirt ; I did it repeatedly without any fuss to
speak of. That lordly elephant-hunter, the Great Wiki,
would, I fancy, have strode over safely and with dignity, but
the man who was in front of him spun round on his own axis
and flung his arms round the Fan, and they went to earth
together ; the heavy load on Wiki’s back drove them into
the mud like a pile-driver. However we got through in time,
and after I had got up the other side of the ravine I saw the
Fan let the Ajumba go on, and were busy searching themselves
for something.
I followed the Ajumba, and before I joined them felt a
fearful pricking irritation. Investigation of the affected part
showed a tick of terrific size with its head embedded in the
flesh ; pursuing this interesting subject, I found three more,
and had awfully hard work to get them off and painful too for
they give one not only a feeling of irritation at their holding-on
place, but a streak of rheumatic-feeling pain up from it. On
completing operations I went on and came upon the Ajumba
in a state more approved of by Praxiteles than by the general
public nowadays. They had found out about elephant ticks,
so I went on and got an excellent start for the next stage.
By this time, shortly after noon on the first day, we had
struck into a mountainous and rocky country, and also struck
a track— a track you had to keep your eye on or you lost it
in a minute, but still a guide as to direction.
The forest trees here were mainly ebony and great hard
wood trees,1 with no palms save my old enemy the climbing
palm, calamus, as usual, going on its long excursions, up one
tree and down another, bursting into a plume of fronds, and
in the middle of each plume one long spike sticking straight
up, which was an unopened frond, whenever it got a gleam
of sunshine; running along the ground over anything it
meets, rock or fallen timber, all alike, its long, dark-coloured,
rope-like stem simply furred with thorns. Immense must be
the length of some of these climbing palms. One tree I noticed
that day that had hanging from its summit, a good one hundred
and fifty feet above us, a long straight rope-like palm stem.
Interested, I went to it, and tried to track it to root, and
found it was only a loop that came down from another tree.
I had no time to trace- it further; for they go up a tree and
travel along the surrounding tree-tops, take an occasional dip,
and then up again.
The character of the whole forest was very interesting.
Sometimes for hours we passed among thousands upon
thousands of gray-white columns of uniform height (about
100— 150 feet) ; at the top of these the boughs branched out
and interlaced among each other, forming a canopy or ceiling,
which dimmed the light even of the equatorial sun to such
an extent that no undergrowth could thrive in the gloom.
The statement of the struggle for existence was published
here in plain figures, but it was not, as in our climate, a
struggle against climate mainly, but an internecine war from
over population. Now and again we passed among vast
stems of buttressed trees, sometimes enormous in girth ; and
from their far-away summits hung great bush-ropes, some as
straight as plumb lines, others coiled round, and intertwined
among each other, until one could fancy one was looking on
some mighty battle between armies of gigantic serpents, that
had been arrested at its height by some magic spell. All
these bush-ropes were as bare of foliage as a ship’s wire
rigging, but a good many had thorns. I was very curious as
1 Diospyrqs and Copaifua mopane.